Interview with Faculty Fellow Marjan Wardaki
In her forthcoming book, Marjan Wardaki, assistant professor of history and Faculty Fellow in the Center for the Humanities, follows Afghan and Indian scientists who traveled to Germany between the world wars, where they forged intellectual and professional networks that crossed imperial boundaries. Their experiences and engagement with German technology reveal how technical knowledge moved between Europe and South Asia, and how scientists drew on diverse intellectual traditions to pursue new possibilities beyond British control. At the center of this story is Afghanistan, which emerged in the early 20th century as an unlikely hub of international collaboration and anticolonial ambition. By recovering this largely overlooked history, Wardaki’s book challenges familiar narratives of Afghanistan as a perpetual site of conflict and offers a fresh perspective on the relationship between science, technology and the struggle for political independence.
What is your project about?
I am currently writing my first book, a colonial and postcolonial history of science in the South Asian subcontinent. It uncovers the history of the scientific diaspora of Afghan and Indian scientists who traveled to interwar Germany to reshape the landscape of modern science outside the reach of the British empire.
The book shows that migrants transformed both European and South Asian sciences by combining their German training in technology with Indo-Persian, Islamicate and artisanal traditions. In doing so, they generated alternative epistemologies that challenged imperial science and contributed to the making of national institutions. Foregrounding Afghanistan as a critical hub in the history of South Asia reframes the geography of empire and science in the early 20th century. I hope the book also provides a new vocabulary by which we can describe Afghanistan, away from the contemporary categories of religious fanaticism, perennial war zones and the graveyard of empires, which I show are all inherited colonial terms.
